SEO Copywriting For Beginners

Nick Cobb is a freelance copywriter, online marketing consultant and the founder and Managing Director of Write For You Ltd. His principal website, My Freelance Copywriter, provides a wide range of copywriting services to domestic and international businesses, while his sister site. Red Hot Sales Letters, is dedicated to producing profit-pulling sales copy for online marketers.

The author’s views are entirely his own and may not reflect the views of FreelanceCopywritersBlog.com. If you are interested in producing a Guest Post for this blog, please get in touch with your ideas.

The concept of SEO copywriting has taken on a huge amount of significance in recent years. More and more companies are realising just how important a role it plays in pushing their website higher in the search engine rankings. But like anything else, there’s a way to do it right, and a way to do it wrong!

Do it correctly, and you’ll end up with beautifully crafted, search engine optimised website content that appeals to both human beings and the search engines alike. Do it incorrectly, and you’ll end up with an incoherent mess that will have your readers clicking away in seconds.

So if you’re new to the concept of SEO copywriting but can’t afford to hire a professional to do it for you, here are some useful tips to bear in mind…

Don’t Stuff Up

Back in the day, people used to believe that the more keywords you included in your website, the more relevant your site would become, and the higher it would rise in the search engines for your main keyword(s). This resulted in the practice of “keyword stuffing”, which only succeeded in creating ugly and incomprehensible content that repeated the same words over and over again! Google soon cracked down on this and started to penalise sites that did it.

So if you’ve read about the importance of “keyword density” recently and were planning on loading your web pages with your main keywords, think again. By all means, use your keywords in your content, but make sure that your copy makes sense and reads well.

Always remember that good quality content is the most important factor, because not only will it convert visitors into buyers, but it will also have more chance of being linked to, which will ultimately boost your search engine ranking anyway.

The Crowbar Effect

Whatever product or service you’re selling, the headline (or H1 tag) is crucial. This is where you’ll grab your prospect’s attention and pull them further into your website or sales copy. Get this wrong, and you may lose them for good.

So first things first, your headline needs to be intriguing, powerful, and of course, persuasive. And in order to achieve this, it needs to make sense! There’s no point crow-barring your keyword into your H1 tag if it don’t read so good! So think about your readers first. Write the headline or H1 tag with human beings at the forefront of your mind, rather than the search engines. Of course, be sure to include your main keyword, but not at the expense of clarity.

License to Kill

With many sites being built on WordPress these days, more and more people are being given license to change and update their website content. This can be a god-send when designers take 3 days to add a full stop to the end of a sentence, but it can also give people a little TOO MUCH power!

For instance, internal linking can be a great way to boost your search engine ranking, as it allows you to make your site more relevant to your major keywords. Likewise, putting your keywords in bold and italics can also help a little.

However, upon discovering this, I’ve seen many site owners adopt a policy of turning every single one of their keywords into internal links, or putting them all into bold and italics! This has the effect of making the copy extremely difficult to read, which will only serve to drive visitors away. So remember, internal linking is good. Putting your keywords in bold and italicizing them can be of benefit. But don’t go overboard, because you’ll lose potential customers if you do.